Authors
Creative Bioarray
Summary
Traditional cell culture is in 2-dimensions, on plastic dishes or in flasks. It's almost impossible to recapitulate the real conditions cells survive in vivo. Over the past decades, many researchers devoted to looking for new ways to culture cells in a more physiologically relevant manner. Thereby 3D cell culture is generated, which can restore in vivo tissue conditions and processes, as well as provide in vivo like responses. 3D cell culture is an invaluable tool in developmental, cell, and cancer biology. In this guidebook, we will introduce some basic knowledge about 3D cell culture.
Introduction
Unlike 2D culture environments, a 3D cell culture is a unique cell culture environment in which cells can grow or interact with their surroundings in three dimensions. In this artificially created system, these 3D cultures are generally grown in bioreactors or small capsules in which the cells can grow into spheroids or 3D cell colonies.
Cells in 3D environment are good models as ‘near-to-in vivo’ systems and give us useful insights in a variety of ways. They have served as a cost-effective screening platform for drug development and testing providing us with a better and more realistic predictive value for safety and risk assessment. 3D cell culture systems have many applications in differentiation studies such as drug discovery & pharmacological studies, cancer research, gene & protein expression studies, etc. For better understanding, the complex cellular physiological mechanisms are reviewed and presented here.
As is well-known, tissue microenvironment, which includes extracellular matrix (ECM) and surrounding cells, is not only fundamental to tissue formation and function but also crucial in the control of tissue growth and development. Traditional 2D cell cultures lack proper environmental context and structural architecture, which will result in changes in cell functions. When grown in 2D monolayers, normal epithelial cells often lose differentiation characteristics, become highly plastic and show characteristics displayed by tumor cells, while malignant cells often differ from their solid tumor counterparts.
3D cell cultures span the gap between 2D cell cultures and animal models:
3D cell culture provides a reproducible, controlled microenvironment that mimics conditions in vivo.
3D models still being amenable to facile genetic manipulation, biochemical analysis, and imaging.
3D cell cultures enable the studies of questions difficult to address in organisms by creating designed microenvironments in vitro.
3D models have become a valid alternative replacement of animal models.
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